INTERVIEW: Artist Laura Baran

Laura, as you know, I’m a huge, huge, huge fan of your work. For those that might not be familiar with your art, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started doing what you do?

Thank you, Gene. I’m a huge fan of your work, too. I make representational portrait paintings and drawings using oils. I never really had a consistent style, even though I always loved making drawings that looked like the real thing. And I always loved drawing people’s faces. I loved observing and paying attention and taking things in and I found art to be a refuge.

I was raised in New Jersey in a home with a lot of tension and abuse and I was grateful to have this natural ability that was all mine, and no one could take away. And it wasn’t a punishment. I was always being punished and there was a theme of suffering and guilt and rage going on around me, as if that was normal. Art was my safe place to dream and express myself. It was my source of hope, comfort and wellbeing. I was suicidal when I was seven years old, very troubled, but when you’re protecting your family you get very good at faking. I would cry myself to sleep at night and keep my pain a secret.

I started writing in a diary when I was 8, my Mom gave me a diary with a rainbow on the cover and gold-edged pages and a metal lock with a little key. Writing and drawing were hand in hand, treasured ways for me to let out everything I was feeling. I started painting when I found my Dad’s acrylic paint set from the 60′s. It was like opening a treasure chest. I wasn’t good but I loved it. I watched Bob Ross veraciously when he came on TV and tried to figure out how he did it.

When I was 18 I moved to New York. I taught myself how to blend with acrylics. I didn’t paint with oil paints till I was 20.

Eventually, I went to F.I.T. in New York and studied illustration to learn composition and techniques. I found what I loved best in a class with a teacher, who is also an amazing painter, named Kam Mak. He taught how to paint what you see, shoot photo reference, match color for color, value relationships, painting mediums, so I really soaked up all this painting technique that I was craving to learn. I was grateful to finally learn how. Kam believed in my ability and encouraged me, that was also huge. And my favorite medium now is still oil paints. And oil pastels when I draw. It’s is beautiful, rich and luminous and creamy.

I think about my art as a diary. And I still write every day. Both are cathartic and fun.

*What feeds your creativity? And how important is it for you to be a creative? That’s what I like to call us: Creatives

Other artists feed my creativity, as well as just being alive. My experiences and relationships feed my creativity, how could they not, right?

Other artists of all kinds inspire me to keep going deeper and get more honest and connected. So thank you, Gene. I saw one of your magicalized portraits the first time we met, you were delivering it to the person who commissioned it. It really was magical and I fell in love with your color combinations and ideas.

I think everyone is a creative, everyone has the potential. I think I could dunk like Michael Jordan if I was talented and worked hard and if I was passionate about basketball. Creativity is also within us all. I think drawing and painting can be learned.

I love Ryan Schneider‘s work. His colors and expression just hit me in my heart.

It’s important that I do what Erin Stutland calls “honor your desires”. She’s the reason we met! Her life-changingly fun workout class called Shrink Session. I love that thought that she talks about – honoring our fun, exciting creative urges through action. It took me many years to really take my art seriously, and what I’m learning is that every talent, every thing that you love to do, is really the key to what I think is a successful life, if you make that thing your priority and do it. And don’t worry how it will turn out.

A lot of the pieces that I’ve seen are self-portraits, which I always find fascinating. What I mean is, for me, a self-portrait is a peek into how the artist views his or herself. If you are able to, or would like to share, can you give us an idea of how you go about creating a self-portrait? What motivates the piece?

I didn’t draw my own face till I was applying to art school. Parsons asks for a self portrait in their admissions to the fine art program. I remember sitting in front of the mirror, having a hard time looking into my own eyes and at my own face and not deeming it of value enough, or worthy enough to be put down on paper in a pencil drawing. My head was so negative and mean and critical, even though another quieter voice was sweet and sad and didn’t want to believe those mean things.

For a couple weeks in the winter of 2003 that I told myself I would make one drawing per day. I was going to my office job, temping as an assistant buyer for Ross Stores (because I believed I could only make a wage in offices, not as an artist – a belief I healed recently. That’s not what I believe at all any more). Anyway, I never stopped drawing and painting throughout my life, but I would let other things, including myself, get in the way of my creative action. So for those couple of weeks, I decided to make art every day. I was the only one around, and the only one I felt comfortable asking to sit for an hour or longer, so I drew and painted myself in the mirror. Visual diary. Hugely comforting way to express my sadness and pain. And fun. Made me feel alive. And it helped me to feel comfortable looking at my own self. Those drawings and paintings look sad, but I had so much joy making them. And since then when I make a self portrait it’s also this fun to watch progression of me feeling better about myself and my life. They become kinder, I think.

© Laura Baran

I love beauty, whatever beauty is to me wherever I am. It changes and it’s undefinable. So growing up I was always drawing things I thought were beautiful. I bought Vogue magazines with my babysitting money and drew Linda Evangelista and Beverly Peele. I think I wanted so much to be beautiful. And I didn’t think that I was. So to be drawing my own face was challenging. Now I love it. I love my face, I love accepting and approving what I see in the mirror every time I look at it. Now my self portraits are like snapshots of me in time, in the way I see myself and the way I feel and what mood i’m in. Does anyone say snapshot anymore?

Song: 8 [Different Ways]Composed: Michael Morgan & Gene-Manuel

I feel that my work has played an integral part in my rebirth and coming out of being in such a dark place for so long. I know you’ve used art to uplift not only yourself, but others. Can you elaborate a little on the role that art has played in your own life?

Yes, I feel that way too. I started combining art with writing to make myself feel better in 2006. I was recovering from lifelong depression, anxiety, really not liking myself and feeling pessimistic about the world and my place in it. My brother Jeff jumped off the George Washington Bridge in 2000, when he was 20. I was 23. He told me he was suicidal. I was too, but I never attempted it. I knew Jeff’s death was coming because he was a person of his word. So I sought out therapy for the first time in my life, at 23, having wanted it for years and years. I was desperate to find a way to stop Jeff from killing himself. I tried out 2 or 3 therapists before I found one in Queens that my Mother agreed to pay for (he was a religious Jew, that was her comfort zone). Jeff was in therapy too, for the last 3 months of his life. His therapist told my Mom that Jeff was one of the most depressed patients he ever counseled and he asked her to consider hospitalizing Jeff or committing him.

But anyway, I was in that therapist’s office in Queens, having my first session with him, basically just crying and begging for advice on how to stop Jeff from killing himself, and the therapist told me to relax, that Jeff was not going to do it. And I got out of that session and had missed a call from Jeff saying goodbye. He was gone. But his body wasn’t found till 5 weeks later. So anyway, I went through crazy, mournful, guilt-ridden, worse than anything I’d ever experienced next several years.

My life turned into a waking nightmare. And eventually in 2006 I had a really unexplainable spiritual experience where I couldn’t eat or sleep for days and I opened myself up to forgiving myself, my family, all of my negative experiences, and it culminated in a near death experience where I thought I was going to die from being awake. The song “Help!” by the Beatles popped into my head and I called a friend to sing it to me, and eventually I felt hungry again and I was able to sleep. I came out of that gentler and softer.

My friend Patricia Geremia, who I met at my office job at the time, she is a healer and a wonderful photographer and human being, she invited me and 2 other women to a group at her apartment to read this book called You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay. And holy shit, this book spoke to me and I breathed it in, I loved its wisdom and clarity and beauty. I threw myself into her suggested actions on how to love yourself. Looking into your own eyes in a mirror and saying “I love you.” That was hard. But I really wanted to try this. I wanted to try optimism, and beliefs in a benevolent world and a love force (instead of the punishing God I learned about from the age of 7 in religious schools). It transformed me, I allowed it to transform me because I realized I never tried to feel good and let myself enjoy my life. I had always been beating myself up, and this was a welcome change.

So Louise Hay talks about affirmations, nice sentences, kind words that feel good. And one night in 2006 in my little SRO studio apartment on 20^th Street and 7^th Avenue, an affirmation popped into my head (I had been talking in therapy – different therapist, by the way – about how I spent so many years feeling responsible for things that were out of my control, like Jeff’s death). So the sentence was: “I am not responsible for anything but me.” And I felt this need to write this out, in big letters, and look at it. I grabbed this big slab of Masonite that I just gessoed white, intending to paint on it, and wrote that sentence in big capital block letters with an orange sharpie. And then I colored it in. That was my first affirmation painting. I never thought of it in those terms, it just was something good, a good-feeling thought for me to look at. And I started making more. And making them beautiful, so that they were fun to look at. The paintings were fun to make, again, cathartic, and really useful in reprogramming my brain to start telling me nice things, sweet things. My friends would come over and we would laugh about how I’m never going to have sex having these paintings everywhere that said “I feel safe” and “I take excellent care of myself”. It was a creative act of healing.

I came alive and healed so much trauma and sadness and anger in the last 6 years and I’m really interested in contributing these ideas that helped me heal to help other people to heal too. Or just to feel good by making art.

In 2009, Patricia and I started doing workshops that I called Arts & Dreams where we went into schools and taught kids what affirmations are and gave them paints and brushes and led them to make affirmation paintings for themselves. I really enjoy imparting this idea and these tools to kids as a way to prevent suicide by building hope and love. I tell them that they don’t have to believe every thought in their head. And they can be creative in ways to be kind and gentle to themselves, and to value who they are. So we are still going strong with Arts & Dreams. I’m writing a blog (with Patricia) all about Arts & Dreams for The Whirling Blog, so look out for that coming soon! This week we’re visiting the Children’s Hospital in Harlem. Empowerment through art is really an exciting idea for me, it combines 2 things I love – art and healing, and I want to give, and use what helped me to help others.

*You have recently started doing commissioned portraits. I have seen one of them on Facebook and was blown away by it. What you do is magical to me, really. Is this the first time you are doing commissioned portraits? And if so, what inspired you to start?

Thank you. I started selling commissioned paintings in my 20s. But I never felt brave enough or good enough to advertise and do it full time. I get to embody what’s really important to me and live the life of my dreams by sharing my gifts. I do know it is a gift. It comes from within and without, it’s got nothing to do with me apart from me making time to sit down and paint. I view art making as a spiritual, creative act. And I love human faces and experiences and our stories. It’s like Walt Whitman said “In the faces of men and women, I see god.” I love painting portraits and I’m excited about doing it full time.

*I’m already excited about commissioning you for a portrait! What does the process entail?

I work from photographs. So I ask for several photos to choose from and we select one. I can create something beautiful that is photo realistic and I can also work with you to craft a setting, or a dreamy background. We can talk about your ideal scenario that I can work with you to depict visually.

© Laura Baran

For example, in my life, I wanted to experience a really wonderful, soulful and fun love relationship. So I found a photograph that inspired that feeling, by Yvan Rodic, the blogger, and I wrote to him asking if I could use it as reference for a painting. He agreed, and I created this painting (see image above) based on his picture, but with personal details and colors I wanted. A week after starting it, I met my boyfriend and used his face as reference for the male. So the “see it, believe it, will it” idea is a really fun one that I’m playing with lately. And I want to create those for you, too, as a patron, to materialize your dreams.

Portrait/Commissions/Art Inquiries: LAURABARAN.COM
Follow Laura on Twitter: LAURABARAN
Information on Arts & Dreams: Arts & Dreams

Read about Arts & Dreams: How We Began Our Dream to Empower and Inspire: Arts & Dreams”

Read additional interviews: INTERVIEWS

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